"A good tree brings forth good fruit, an evil tree brings forth evil fruit" (Matthew 7:17).
When or if Jesus spoke these words, he spoke them in a Middle Eastern language, Aramaic. In Aramaic and in all the Semitic languages, the word for good primarily means ripe, and the word for evil primarily means unripe. When heard with Aramaic ears, this sentence might sound more like this:
"A ripe tree brings forth ripe fruit, an unripe tree brings forth unripe fruit."
This makes a world of difference. The tree is not morally bad, but rather unripe: this is not the right time and place for it to bear. The saying gives an example from nature. Rather than imposing an external standard of goodness, the lesson has to do with time and place, setting and circumstance, health and disease.
Likewise, whenever a saying of Jesus refers to spirit, we must remember that he would have used an Aramaic or Hebrew word. In both of these languages, the same word stands for spirit, breath, air, and wind. So "Holy Spirit" must also be "Holy Breath." The duality between spirit and body, which we often take for granted in our Western languages, falls away. If Jesus made the famous statement about speaking or sinning against the Holy Spirit (for instance, in Luke 12:10), then somehow the Middle Eastern concept of breath is also involved.
The Hidden Gospel explores these simple yet radical differences that reveal the spirituality behind the sayings of Jesus from a Middle Eastern viewpoint. The differences stem from the nature of Middle Eastern languages themselves as well as the worldview behind them, that is, the ways in which they divide and make sense of reality. The book also invites the reader to participate in the wisdom revealed by this approach as a direct, personal experience.Another World The German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, "The limits of my language are the limits of my world." This especially holds true for the translation and interpretation of the words of Jesus. For one thing, Middle Eastern languages allow for many different interpretations, and even different literal translations, of the words of a prophet or mystic.
If I were writing about the words of Moses or Isaiah, a Jewish audience would easily understand what I am doing in this book as midrash, a type of spiritual translation-interpretation that uses the possible meanings of Hebrew words as a basis for contemplation, devotion, and spiritual practice. In midrash one attempts through contemplation to make a scriptural passage or a saying of a holy person into a living experience that can meet the challenges of the present. Likewise, most Sufi Muslims would understand my efforts as tawil, a style of translation-interpretation that again considers the possible multiple meanings of a sacred text in order to cultivate wisdom for one's everyday life. As we shall explore later, in both traditions each person is free to do this interpretation in her or his own way.
In the Christian Church, especially as it evolved in the West, it became more important to determine what Jesus represented as "Christ" or "Messiah" than to look at his sayings in a Middle Eastern sense. In addition, up until the last fifty years, most Western Christian churches blamed the people they identified with "the Jews" of the Gospels for the death of Jesus. So for the Western Christian church at least, facing the question of Jesus' own Jewishness was definitely off the agenda.
At the same time, in scholarly circles over the past hundred years, researchers began to look at Western textual or historical evidence for who Jesus was and what he said. In some extreme viewpoints, the factual existence of Jesus was considered a myth and presumed to have no reality outside the text. In others, presuppositions about the nature of early Christianity prejudiced the opinions of scholars about which strands of text were the oldest and so the most historically accurate. In addition, since the primary Western and Orthodox church texts were in Greek, scholars saw no point in looking at Aramaic or Hebrew versions. To do so would have underlined Jesus' Jewishness. Most often, scholars interpreted Jesus according to Greek or Hellenistic influences of his time, rather than Middle Eastern ones. The "historical Jesus" emerged as a multitude of conflicting figures, varying according to the disposition of the scholar and the facts she or he selected.
Over the past generation, much of this has changed. There has been a concerted effort in some quarters of the Christian church to review and reinterpret the sections of the Gospels (particularly in John) that seem to demonize the people called "the Jews." One Christian scholar has made a convincing case that one cannot even speak of distinct groups called Christians or Jews in the biblical era.(1) As we shall see, the earliest so-called "Jesus movements" represented a multiplicity of practices and beliefs. The same was true for what we call "Judaism," which also did not begin to take the organized shape we recognize today until after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 C.E. So the word translated as "Jews" in the Gospels should more accurately be translated "Judaeans"-the inhabitants of the area called Judaea by the Romans.
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